Re: Beowulf at SIUC?

[Sean /The RIMBoy/ <sean@rimboy.com>]

On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, Chester wrote:

> My adviser is steering me towards doing simulations of fault-
> tolerant strategies for multiprocessing.  (What if a node
> has a hardware failure?  What if a node has an operating
> system failure?  What if a connection fails?) My impression
> right now is that a Beowulf system would work nicely for this.
> However, I remember now reading about another Beowulf that had
> two ports per node, so I agree with you on this issue.

Hmm... that could be interesting, but it sounds like you would be more
interested in failover that in beowulf... beowulf has to have its apps
specifically written to take advantage of the clustering environment.  

Mosix is more designed for load balancing.  

> I've only glanced at Mosix.  It does not seem to be open source.

Nope, mosix is GPL.  Check out the Distribution link... right there in the
distro terms.

> I am wondering about the possibility of having a Beowulf in the
> math department and another Beowulf in the CS department that
> communicated with each other.  Right now I'm just playing with
> ideas.  I have permission to contact the math department 
> professors and I still need to contact two CS professors who
> want a cluster.  Their opinions may overrule any of my
> current ideas.

I think Beowulf is going to be a little network intensive... I dunno, it
will just depend on your app I suppose.  Most that run Beowulf run it all
in the same room or in a very closely connected net (ie, all in the same
net behind the same router).  I would think going from building to
building, depending on campus topology and other factors could be a little
intensive / a bottleneck for the net and cluster.

>  Who is LJ? 

Linux Journal.

> Where do I get 4 port network cards  and how much do they cost?

3com sells some I believe, but they will cost you.

You will probably want to investigate PVM and MPI... from what I have read
it allows you to interconnect various platforms for the processing.

Also, Linux Magazine (which I think is 10x better than LJ at this time)
has a whole section on Clustering and discusses piranna... a clustering
solution for ?apache?  I just got mine in the mail today... I would guess
it is on the shelves at this point.  You might pick it up.  It has blurbs
on different solutions available.

Also, and I open this invite to everyone, if you are free the first
weekend in November come on down to Nashville TN (not IL ;)  ) for
se2600's 4th annual hackers con "Phreaknic".  The Nashville Linux User
Group will probably try to get some sort of clusting up and going during
the con... we have a butt load (just short of an a$$ load though) of 486's
that we are going try to cluster together.  Please don't laugh if we
cluster via tokenring (16)... its a hackers con and we are sick people.
As a matter of fact, I'll probably be bringing a Telco Systems Route 24
PBX and try to get my phreak on.  I'll also be draggin out some of my
Apple II stuff, but that is another story.

Sean...

Everything you know is wrong,
Just forget the words and sing along.    --Weird Al
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